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When you cry and the crying/sobbing has no content. When you don’t know why you are crying, then something deep is clearing out.
But when you know why you are crying, then some past, some meaning, some opinion gets confirmed and your ego will continue giving you ‘reason’ to cry.
I have a student who uses collages to cause her growth… Unfortunately her collaging has been, recently, of the second sort of crying: she is illustrating her grief over life not being the way she wants it… So she is going deeper and deeper into having a reason to cry.
I watched a mini-series yesterday. It ended with a big surprise. It shook me up.
The sobbing came today. I don’t know why I cried. And I don’t know if I was crying for the person in the movie, for you, for myself… I don’t know.
I have had nothing similar in my life happen… But I felt the regret, the shame, the guilt, the despair, the hopelessness, and the resolution… and these are universal for any misdeed.
When you try to get through completing your past without thoughtless sobbing, you are being guided by Ego.
Ego wants you to pretend that you are doing what you need to do to get back to nothing… the only place from where you can build anything that lasts.
In the Landmark Education Forum they say: We promise you nothing… and that sounds like there are no guarantees, right?
But on the last day around 8 pm you would find out that the ‘nothing’ they promised is actually a place, that is not so easy to get to. And unless you get there, your life is a seamless repetition of the past.
Whether you do it in the Landmark Education Forum, or with me, you need to do that work if you want a different future, different from your past.
I spent the first 60+ years of my life hovering barely above despair.
That is the best you can do, unless you completely get into nothing.
For a long time I didn’t completely gone to no thing, or maybe I just didn’t stay there. (No thing is the reality where nothing that doesn’t belong to reality hangs out there. There are no meanings that belong to reality. No running commentary. Neither opinion. Nor wrong, nor right. No good and no bad. Just what is real. That is the place called no thing.)
For decades I went as far as I could with what I had. I built, then I destroyed it. Again and again.
I like what I am building now.
It is worth going below the foundation. It is worth going deep deep, and see what is there. What is there that I haven’t confronted yet.
Surprisingly I am not afraid, I am actually curious. Even though I know that what I’ll find will be ugly.
But I have been training myself to be able to stay present with anything ugly… to face the tiger and stay so calm that I can tell each ear-hair apart… hold the tiger’s stare with mine, and stay curious, instead of going for ‘cheap closure now’ and run… (This is what TLB is)
Is there a place really that is ‘nothing’? No baggage, nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to resent, nothing to regret?
Honestly, I don’t know. How could I?
I only know that I have done a lot of digging, faced a lot of ugly about myself, and I feel I am close to having cleared it all.
You may have not even started.
The question is: is it worth doing the work for you…
…or do you prefer the deadness of hiding, covering up, pretending, in the tiny space that has remained to give you an illusion that you have choices?
Is it a harsh question? It is. In the thousands of years humans have been around, we have gathered enough ‘karma’ for life to look absolutely hopeless… But it isn’t.
The reason I put the word karma in quotation marks, because it is not really karma in a sense that it would be a debt. Debt can be cleaned up by doing the opposite, i.e. ‘good karma’. But that is not how it works in the world of reality.
In the reality that humans are, no good deed cancels out bad deeds. Only OWNING the bad deed disappears the bad deed.
By the way: just like in integrity, bad deed is what your conscience labels as bad deed, not the society’s norms… not even mine. lol.
YOU know what is bad therefore you can clean it up.
Doing good deeds is futile… the more good deeds you do, the more guilt you feel… Really.
The only thing that cancels out the spiritual debt is the full ownership of it. Seeing what it has cost to you, to your future, to the other. Cry, sob, grieve.
When you do that, it goes away fast. In minutes.
If you aren’t… it will linger. Until you do.
Your tendency to pretend to do the work is endless.
You now earned your misery twice. Congratulations.
Unless your desire to be on Life’s side is big enough, you won’t do it, you can’t do it.
Doing this work is like flying the trapeze. You have to let go of on bar, fly and catch the next bar…
When back in 1980-81 I contemplated leaving Hungary, I knew it was like a trapeze, with the big difference: I didn’t know, couldn’t be sure that there was another trapeze waiting for me, another trapeze I could catch.
It was like suicide for an atheist: atheists don’t believe in the afterlife. Death is final. Now, with that in mind: will you do it?
Life wants you to do it.
But you want certainty, and the only certain for you is what you know. So you want what you know… and what you know is not what you want…
Talk about stupid.
The flying, the dying is not real, except for the ego. But as long as ego runs the show, ego runs your life… fear of dying will be there… and there won’t be any ‘new life’, new you, better life, growth, evolution for you.
Sorry to break it to you so bluntly…
So, what can you do if you can’t weaken ego? Then you have to strengthen Life Force.
We don’t have direct access to Life Force, although we know that emotions weaken it. Dehydration weakens it. Poor eating habits weaken it.
You can attend to your health… and you can attend to your emotions…
In the upcoming Invent your Self, your ‘who I am’ workshop (2 sessions) we’ll identify your original ‘wrong’ statement, and attempt to look at it from different vantage point, including the Witness. I’ll activate the Driftwood capacity to help you with that.
The goal is that you, at least, have a sense that what you said about that incident isn’t real… it only happened in your head that way. That what you said was wrong only happened in your head.
And then we’ll attempt to look how you would be, who you would be without that stuck view of the world that says ‘something wrong was done to me’.
Invent your Self, your ‘who I am’
